From Here to Financial Happiness

Day Thirteen Control What You Can

Take a look at yesterday's list of smart and dumb moves. Now ask yourself: Were your smart moves truly smart – and your dumb moves truly dumb?

For instance, moving a big chunk of money into stocks just before the 2007–2009 market crash might seem like a dumb move. But how could we have known stocks were about to crash? I'd argue that wasn't a dumb move, but rather, bad luck.

The reality is, there's much about our financial lives that we can't control, so luck plays a role. We don't know whether the financial markets will plunge tomorrow. We can't control whether we fall seriously ill and need expensive medical care. We can't stop our employer from shuttering our division and laying off all employees.

Sound bad? While we can't control these things, we can plan for their possibility – by making sure our portfolio isn't too risky, we have health insurance, and our finances can withstand a long bout of unemployment.

Moreover, there's much about our financial lives that we can control and where we have the chance to help or hurt our financial future. Signing up for our employer's 401(k) plan as soon as we're hired is a smart move. Going on a spending spree and maxing out our credit cards is a dumb move. These are both decisions where we're firmly in the driver's seat.

What else can we control? Go back and look at the list of simple, no‐nonsense strategies that I offered on day 2. We have a lot of control over how much we save, how much debt we ...